companies like Sony often have a problem their old games competing with their new games and like Sony when your brand is built off those old games having amazingly strong IP well you end up losing a lot of money CU your average sale price plummets and today's story is Sony's attempt to fix that problem you see while headlines of scalpers buying up PS5 anniversary editions were dominating something else happened something that very few noticed see the state of play announced Horizon zero Dawn remastered and when I reported it I tried to save you some money what You' do right is you'd buy the original complete edition of the game and then you'd hand over your 10 bucks whenever the remaster comes out so you end up paying less the bad news is that Sony were on to us the good news well I'm on to them and I've got backup from today's sponsor which is dead handy and an absolute Lifesaver the Ukraine 130 watt nexo 2,000 milliamp hour power bank look I put this in my bag every day I take it pretty much everywhere it is super super light for the performance that it's got and the shape makes it so easy to pack it's only 480 G and it's got the lovely display let you check how full it is what it's outputting across the two USB C's and one usba and you can even do the neat things like looking at the currents and the voltages or what output you're getting from your charger and to top it off it's got a pretty cute robot face but it'll even give you 100 Watts on the C1 port and 30 Watts at the same time that lets me say charge my phone and my laptop at Max Speed simultaneously and capacity wise like that's enough to charge my iPhone 15 four times I of course support the various fast charging protocols and are full of safety protections like thermal guard and it's even tested to retain over 80% capacity after a th000 charge discharge Cycles so amazing specs amazing price to Performance but for me it's just experience this charges in 2 hours I pop it in my bag and no matter where I go I can just trust that I've got power if there's no plug at the coffee shop seat that's completely fine and for the likes of Gamescom and BlizzCon like doing convention work utter lifesaver it's such an upgrade which is why it's in my EDC and of course there's also a 12,000 milliamp hour version that is an absolute price to Performance King if you don't need as much capacity the good news is you can pick yours up and check them out at the links down below so thanks to ug green for sponsoring let's get into the video first the PS5 Shenanigans Sony doubled the price of Horizon zero Dawn complete edition yep 2x it is now $39. 99 it used to be $19. 99 of course if you add in the $10 upgrade price and you get $49.
99 which is the remastered RRP and it is a bad look the zero Dawn complete edition was part of the PlayStation hits collection and every other game in that collection currently retails $19. 99 and to make things feel worse none of this was talked about publicly in any way you just would go onto the store and find that that's what the game would cost and you wouldn't really know any better what they did here is abundantly clear it is an artificial price hike it's just them trying to collect more money and the thing is it could actually get them in some trouble you see recent L Sony stopped selling digital games in retail stores you can no longer buy game codes the only place to get a digital PS5 game is the Sony store and when this happened Regulators in the United Kingdom were actually suspicious they thought that this could be getting in a monopolistic Direction so I have to wonder how they feel about this Sony using their complete control over the sales of zero Dawn digitally to artificially hike the price because the fair market value per Sony of this game was $1 19. 99 along with everything else in the PlayStation hits collection and if the upgrade is worth $10 which is what they charge for it then surely the fair value of the new version of the game is $29.
99 of course it's not that's why the price increase here with the original complete edition feels a little bit artificial thing is this is far from the only strange thing that's happened next we got to take a look at PC well the good news is US PC Gamers have not missed out on the fun and it's actually more aggressive here you literally cannot buy Horizon zero Dawn on Steam epic or Standalone there is only one way you can buy it and that is the New Horizon zero Dawn remastered bundle yeah that's the only way that of course does include the current complete edition and the remaster and it costs $49. 99 now there are still cases where you can buy the original complete edition because those game Keys exist soy can't just go and delete all of the game keys that are being sold in other places like say Gog but all of this reveals exactly how they think and their aggressive approach to pricing of course they know their games have got strong longtail sales so remakes and remasters can keep the average sale price high for longer and longer but of course on PC it is just a little bit spicier 170 countries just lost the official ability to play this game because all PlayStation games on PC will have the PSN element for linking your PSN account to get trophies friends list and that sort of thing a PS blog confirmed this and it does mean that people in the 170 countries are left out and even worse they um kind of won't be able to get it at all because the original complete edition doesn't exist it's only in the remaster now yeah there is the Saving Grace where game keys for the original exist you can buy those in Gog or others but at its core we're seeing how PlayStation intends to bring the PlayStation model done on the PlayStation Digital Store over to PC and to have the level of price control that they are used to having and it's from here that their strategy begins to become clear to check in with other games hell divers 2 took a beating for PSN but it's now recovered it's got recent reviews at 81% and the latest patch has actually led to a higher Baseline in players Ragnarok got slammed for PSN launch but it's recovered it's at 77% now a modder even made a mod a tool to circumvent PSN and it surged so quickly in popularity that he took it down because he was afraid of Retribution from PlayStation but of course check in with the graph and you can see negative reviews are slowing fast faster than the positives are rising so that does mean it's getting more and more positive and then ghost of sushima well it's at 92% that is barely a dent and that's a game that needed PSN for multiplayer that released when the whole story was exploding now all of this shows something it tips us off to their real strategy so let's understand what PlayStation are actually doing a lot of enthusiasts are pretty angry at PlayStation it could be the things I'm talking about today or it could just be not as many of the Japan feeling games that they used to have in the past those are the people who of course will be loving Astro right now but no their entire plan is to hit far beyond the immediate Enthusiast audience that audience does not matter that's why we've not seen them yield in PSN and PC the thing is they feel like they have to their games are so expensive that they need to hit near 10 million sales for one of their big titles to even be worth making the Insomniac League made this abundantly clear Spider-Man 2 needed to sell 7. 2 million copies at full price in order to break even at full price that's a game that's been out for almost a calendar year and since then it's been on sale just two times and there is in fact a sale on right now but it's a tricky one it is a sale you can get it cheaper but the only thing on sale is the digital deluxe edition it's 28% off 57.
99 in the UK so it is cheaper than the regular edition but it still is pretty damn High that's another part of their strategy do a sale but only on the digital deluxe edition so they don't have to decrease the price all that much even take Ragnarok Ragnarok released summer 2022 it's had eight sales on PSN and its deepest has only been down to $39. 99 which is still a pretty hefty percentage of the original sale price now their current strategy is to expand via film and television it's a major thing Herman Holst has talked about it and it worked incredibly well for the last of us and if things went right it would be working for the Horizon television show that would be further along than it is right now basically the director for that got fired this June so they're undoubtedly pretty pissed off about that but still the strategy hasn't changed and it reminds me of C project red they had a bit of a problem The Witcher TV show even though it's extremely mid has Henry caval it blew up interest and when it did Witcher three SES surged but the game only cost a few quid so they didn't really make as much money as they could have so what I decided to do was look at the price history of Sony's most recent analog which of course is The Last of Us The Last of Us Part two's deepest sale was down to $9. 99 USD as recent as April 2023 and if you were a show viewer right at the end of season 1 that would have been awesome soon after though Last of Us Part Two remaster dropped when it did part two went back to its default price of $39.
99 and its sales only went down to $29. 99 all while part two remaster was sitting happy at $49. 99 with its deepest discount being $9.
99 and that means that other than the base product RP this is exactly the pricing model that they are doing with Horizon and that probably means they've got data to support this pricing model working and well if you want you can go and buy The Last of Us remastered the PS4 near launch title for 1999 which of course is what it is in the PlayStation hits collection the whole point of their full remake is that the full remake The Last of Us Part One sells for $69. 99 right now which is more than part part two and even on sale the part one remake is $39. 99 now the reason why I've went through all of this is because business has got many different facets now obviously we are customers we buy games that's the bit that we care about and in so many cases we're used to buying games in Steam steam is one single Marketplace and it's an absolutely ginormous one with so many games and that means that if you want to get visibility you got to hit the sales button so we're used to sales happening way faster and way deeper than is normal on some other platforms it's basically a race to the bottom Sony though do not do that as you can see today they diligently work to keep their average sale price high and uh there's another company who does it a lot more than Sony do and that company is Nintendo Nintendo are so confident their games are so damn good and so damn unique that they just don't do deep sales at all now obviously a retailer can do whatever they want but look at the eShop pricing TI of the kingdom is $69.
99 it has never been on sale in the eShop it's always been that price they've only discounted Super Mario Odyssey five times in the eShop since 2021 and even then that's only been from its current price of $59. 99 yeah no default decrease in sale price from $59. 99 to $39.
99 and then the smash ultimate it came out in 2018 it has shifted over 30 million copies and on the eShop it has never been discounted never conventional wisdom says that old games are less valuable Nintendo disagrees and they still sell millions of copies of their games this is exactly what Sony wants but it perhaps might even be more than what they wanted may also be what they need because their games are so stupidly expensive just think of the Spider-Man example so it's no wonder then that Sony's PS5 pro has no disc drive they want digital because that gives them full price control and if you do buy physical you will need to buy their upcharge $79. 99 disc drive they are just trying to play a different game to the rest and this makes it clear the Insomniac League tells us that Spider-Man 2 was budgeted at 270 million with a cost overun taking it to around 300 million and the thing is they expect that to go up part of the leaks included slides from what appeared to be an internal postmortem where Ted price Insomniac CEO had disturbing things to say worrying things to say for the health of the industry one slide read we have to make future AAA franchise games for 350 million or less but worse it continued saying this in today's dollars that's like making Spider-Man 2 for $215 million yeah inflation's rough of course it cost 300 so pretty disturbing and assuming that these targets won't happen and they're talking about 350 well I think we're going to get close to 400 million I mean there's a slide that projected 385 million for Spider-Man 3 and 305 million for Wolverine so even with 120 million game being chipped in from Marvel those numbers are insane Spider-Man 1 took 2 years on 100 million to develop peanuts compared to its Sequel and part of the leaked slide is just a brutal line that says is 3x the investment in Spider-Man 2 evident to anyone who plays the game I think to most of us the answer would be some budget increase is evident but not triple those are yesterday's numbers leave a comment what do you think the Last of Us Part three will end up costing you see naughty dog have got a new fanasy to launch first it'll probably fit the end of generation sort of swans song game that has actually kicked off many of Sony's biggest franchises after that for the PlayStation 6 they've got to do The Last of Us Part three that's something that we'll be holding down the last of us as a brand as an IP also the television show so if that's 400 million I certainly wouldn't be surprised and if your games cost that much if you need to sell 7. 2 million at full price just to break even and I suppose that's not even including payment processing costs well you know it's a high-risk game but of course it is what we see a Sony fighting where they are strongest they're going for cultural dominance something that Microsoft just does not have whatsoever and that means that every Sony game has got to be an event those are the jewels in their crown and ideally live services will keep them a little bit more healthy in between they look at Nintendo they see the Nintendo do not discount their games because they're godamn Nintendo you cannot get a Nintendo game elsewhere they do not need to do a sale you will buy Smash and over 30 million of you have Sony want the same they want it to be so that you cannot get a game even close to The Last of Us Part three on the Microsoft console or whatever the next ghost title is after the one they've just revealed that is what they are doing they want it to be at the stage where Microsoft literally cannot compete in the same way that nobody's able to compete with Nintendo and if Microsoft usual as anything to go by Sony will crush them but people will not be happy for it because they will be paying more money if you end up paying $79.
